With currently used methods, eyewear specification in general and lenses specification in particular have relied on manual selection which requires active involvement of a customer or an optical store employee, and very often fails to address the customer's real needs.
Optical stores either offer too many options or rather give only few options. Very often, the customer himself does not know what to look for. In particular, customers do not tend to spend much time learning about lens types and lens options. Consequently, customers end up choosing the wrong types of lenses, say types of lenses which are promoted by the store but do not necessarily fit their real needs.
Lens features and compatibility of lenses with prescription determine visual clarity when buying glasses, and is actually the most important part of the whole process of buying glasses. However, in most cases, customers rush through the lens selection process.
Indeed, with an ever increasing number of optional features which the modern optical industry has to offer, the selection of features for eyewear in general, and lenses in particular has become an even more challenging task for both customers and optical industry workers.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,980,692 discloses a technique for selecting and/or designing ophthalmic lenses. This disclosed technique involves the prescribing and/or dispensing ophthalmic lenses, such as progressive addition lenses, for a wearer. Lens usage information is obtained from a wearer and entered into a programmed computer. The programmed computer processes the lens usage information to provide a separate weighted lifestyle score for each of one or more respective lifestyle score categories, such that each weighted lifestyle score is a function of a predetermined relationship between the respective lifestyle score category and at least ophthalmic lens design feature. The programmed computer then selects or designs an ophthalmic lens design using one or more of the weighted lifestyle scores such that the selected or designed ophthalmic lens has at least one lens design feature which has been customized using one or more of the weighted lifestyle scores.